LIFE ISN'T A TOPIC, IT'S AN URGENCY WITH PITSTOPS

LIFE ISN’T A TOPIC, IT’S AN URGENCY WITH PITSTOPS

Life isn’t a topic, it’s an urgency with pitstops

and beatific interludes of relief along the way

that pass for peace. Is there necessity in what you say?

Is it agitated like a spider in the morning

vibrating in its web, a pulsar in a mandala

of guitar strings, a safety net of spinal cords

resonating with true north, a magnetic pole

changing its spin, butterflies witching for wavelengths

well beyond the range of their rabbit ears

as they make slight adjustments to their antennae?

I knew a painter once who was 37% mad,

who chained his spontaneity like a guest to a bed

and planned to be inspired by the blueprint

of the starmap of fireflies he carried in his head

whenever he was off his daily agenda of meds.

Sensitive stuff, but I told him anyway,

if it bears repeating, your silence isn’t original enough.

Who needs to be immortal while they’re alive?

It’s like a ghost trying to haunt a house of life

before the tenet in residence has moved out of it

into a tenured coffin of his own. And I don’t care

how much polish gets rubbed like starlight

into the spurs and badges of the drugstore outlaws

riding shotgun on the golden hearse of the sun,

it’s still just a strongbox of money spiders

when you shoot the lock off of it like the nose ring

of a white winged horse saddled by a green horn

that gets bucked off his own thermals like a burr

trying to break into a circle of milkwagons

to protect the butter urns from savages in blue war bonnets

in an ambush of peacocks with empty magazines.

Not everyone likes the taste of fraudulent margarine,

furniture wax, shoe polish, bear grease or axle oil.

Having their eyelashes cleaned off with turpentine

to keep the flies out of the ointment, the colours pure.

As if light had joined the Taliban and held a grudge

against your eyes. Aniconic palettes. Black. Black. Black.

No foreseeable rainbows on the wings of aspiring maggots.

Nothing but these false dawns and sunsets that taste

like the must of old men smudging their pearls of wisdom

like opalescent cataracts nacreously waning

like the love lyrics of a decresent moon

to the younger undertakers bedding their bones,

pearl divers closing the mouths of the oysters

they’ve shucked like books and lavish satin coffins

as if every cloud had a silver lining that mistook

its perfect binding for a vision of life without salt or sand.

Everyone gratified if their point of view, for their eyes only,

like the colour blue without irises, or a flowerless green,

were reflected by windows into the souls of the fanatically bland.

PATRICK WHITE